Paragraphs 50 and 51 of the Beijing Platform for Action. Chapter IV. A. Women and Poverty
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/23
50. While poverty affects households as a whole, because of the gender division of labour and responsibilities for household welfare, women bear a disproportionate burden, attempting to manage household consumption and production under conditions of increasing scarcity. Poverty is particularly acute for women living in rural households.
51. Women’s poverty is directly related to the absence of economic opportunities and autonomy, lack of access to economic resources, including credit, land ownership and inheritance, lack of access to education and support services and their minimal participation in the decision-making process. Poverty can also force women into situations in which they are vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
Let’s take a look at the division of labour for women in this particular article today, we can see paragraphs 50 and 51 cover a small smattering in word count but a wider coverage in content and implications, shall we begin, or, rather, continue this educational journey?
The poverty affecting women is immense, around the world, especially in the forms and metrics. The worst levels of poverty are more likely to be faced by women. Indeed, the measures on the disproportionate levels of the greatest poverty are faced by women more often, which implies the disproportionate access to the levers of power and the means of influence – even choice – within the society.
This is a global problem to this day, with some variation depending on the region and country of the world taken into account. Now, the ability for open person, more often a woman, to manage a household, as many in some advanced industrial economies know, is extremely difficult and can take, at a minimum, 18 years of good life working and, in core, slaving away at low-wage work to maintain a baseline level of life quality for the family. This is seen in single-parent families.
This becomes a particularly difficult situation for the women living in rural contexts. Those women who lack the ability or the freedom – functionally the same – to sustain themselves and their families in an equitable manner to men because the poorest of the poor, especially within the rural contexts of developing societies. The questions then arise within the context of paragraph 51 – as you can very likely tell with the logical progression as if a tacit argument, of one paragraph to another and one chapter to the next one.
Women become poor for a variety of reasons. One of them is the lack of freedom of choice, restriction in autonomy coming from a wide variety of contexts. One is the restriction in the ability to earn a living and make their way in the world. This creates impacts in the chances for women to become economically independent. That restriction becomes one of the most impactful and consequential not only for the individual woman but for families – and so by logical necessity – and communities and societies as well.
Indeed, arguments in favour of the economic restriction of women amount to arguments, by derivative or consequence based on international evidence, for the impoverishment of women, families, communities, and societies, in general, over time, at least, and especially, more than would be otherwise the case if women had the economic opportunity, access, and freedom.
These can come in a variety of economic restrictions such as the mentioned “credit, land ownership, and inheritance” as direct instances but also with the indirect instances involving the “lack of access to education and support services”; that is to say, the inability to get an education means an inability to acquire decent work and so standard of living for the individual woman, which amounts to an indirect economic restriction on the women in the world.
Then there is the cases of simply being in poverty making getting out more difficult than if one was not in as penurious a circumstance as otherwise could be the case; in fact, this leads to the final point about these women, in particular, being vulnerable to sexual exploitation, which, as a matter of principle, is something the sociopolitical left gets wrong as a moral and ethical issue.
That issue where no matter the context this gets seen as a free economic decision similar to those who may not make a distinction between freedom to choose child labour and enforced child labour with good working conditions; you want to rid the world of child labour – ages 14 to 16 with changes depending on the country, which makes no sense as it is the same species and so should, by implication, be one age across the world and not selective to suit the peculiar dictates of one nation or another – and not simply make the working conditions for child forced into labour better or worse.
–One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
- Beijing Declaration(1995).
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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